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We continue our analytical look at quotes from the Super Bowl with a breakdown of what Dustin Keller said about Santonio Holmes.
Look-it, I know that Keller was taking the high road, but this quote about Keller was quite esoteric.
“Santonio is a big playmaker,” Keller said. “He’s a great guy in the locker room. I think pretty much everyone would consider him a good friend on the team. It’s just really uncharacteristic of him. We know that things can be settled, and he’ll be a huge piece for us next year.”
Okay, it’s hard to argue with the first sentence; he certainly is a big play-maker. I will just add one thing to this. If he truly wants to be that big play-maker again, he must hold-on to the football, and study the playbook more (he sometimes runs the wrong routes).
The next sentence is hard to agree with – “He’s a great guy in the locker room?”
One unnamed Jets player told the Daily News that Holmes is actually “a cancer” in the locker room.
This is a player who threw the quarterback and offensive line under the bus to the media early in the season.
And when asked for a quote from the New York Times on Mark Sanchez for a big feature on the quarterback, Holmes responded, “You don’t want to know what I think.”
Granted, the media is only in the locker room for 45 minutes a day, but I almost never saw Holmes talking to any teammates.
Also, he’s so moody, so surely some teammates are afraid to interact with him, at times.
So to say “he’s a great guy in the locker room” is a surprising statement.
The next sentence is hard to embrace as well – “I think pretty much everyone would consider him a good friend on the team.”
Yeah, I’m sure that Mark Sanchez and Brandon Moore consider him “a good friend.”
And what about Wayne Hunter who he almost got into a fight in the huddle in Miami in Week 17?
If you polled the Jets locker room, in a private ballot, and asked them how many considered Holmes – “a good friend,” the results weren’t be favorable.
We might be looking at 20-30 percent, and if the Jets had released Holmes, not a lot of people in that room would shed a tear.
The next sentenced floored me – “It’s just really uncharacteristic of him.”
What Holmes did last year was far from “uncharacteristic of him.”
The Steelers couldn’t take his attitude and indescretions off the field, and were willing to trade him to another playoff contender in the conference for a fifth round pick.
“Clearly, Santonio is a very talented football player,” Steelers president Art Rooney II said following the trade. “But his multiple violations of league policies and the additional off-the-field problems led us to conclude it would be in the best interests of our organization to part ways.”
I’m not going to go over all of Santonio’s problems through the years (we did a feature in the last issue of JC Magazine, if you needed a detailed account), but they are many, and his poor behavior last year was far from “out of character.”
In our next part of this series, we will look at the last sentence of this quote, and whether this can be fixed.
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